Over the last few weekends I’ve spend some time building a simple robot that can be controlled using Kinect. You can see it in action below.

Ever since I read this Cisco paper that mentions Internet Of Things will crate a whooping 14.4 Trillion $ at stake, I revamped my interests in hobby electronics and started hacking with DIY boards like Arduino and Raspberry Pi. That turned out to be fun, and ended up with the robot. This post provides you the general steps, and the github code may help you build your own.

Even if you don’t have a Kinect for the controller, you can easily put together a controller using your phone (Windows Phone/Android/iOS) as we are using blue tooth to communicate with the controller and the robot. Thanks to my younger kid for the background screaming audio effect in the below video, she was running behind the bot to kick it.

Now, here is a quick start guide to build your own. We’ve an app running in the laptop that is communicating to the Robot via blue tooth in this case that pumps the commands based on input from Kinect, you could easily build a phone UI as well. And if you already got the idea, here is the code – You may read further to build the hardware part.